


Thunder Warriors

by moreagaara



Series: Before the Imperium [9]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betrayal, Blood, Blood Magic, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Fanfiction, Gap Filler, Gen, Golems, Implied/Referenced Violence, Literature, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Pre-Canon, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Unification Wars (40k), War, discussions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:01:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21561862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: And here we see my take on what the hell the Thunder Warriors (with which the Emperor did the majority of his conquering of Terra) actually were.  The answer:  golems.  Canon is not clear about what they actually were, though, but it does say that they were faster and stronger than space marines, but also had zero percent chill or idea of what peace actually was.  I hope my take made it clear that Daenus dun fucked up in making the golems, because he completely forgot to tell them what peace was.  Thus why he had to slaughter them (and yes, that part is completely canon).Peep Ownership:WH40k and related:  Games Workshopthe writing, the Emperor's name, and Primam Tonat (not named, but he's the first golem Daenus made):  me
Series: Before the Imperium [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1454170
Kudos: 1





	Thunder Warriors

**Author's Note:**

> And here we see my take on what the hell the Thunder Warriors (with which the Emperor did the majority of his conquering of Terra) actually were. The answer: golems. Canon is not clear about what they actually were, though, but it does say that they were faster and stronger than space marines, but also had zero percent chill or idea of what peace actually was. I hope my take made it clear that Daenus dun fucked up in making the golems, because he completely forgot to tell them what peace was. Thus why he had to slaughter them (and yes, that part is completely canon).
> 
> Peep Ownership:  
> WH40k and related: Games Workshop  
> the writing, the Emperor's name, and Primam Tonat (not named, but he's the first golem Daenus made): me

Daenus had spent weeks discussing what to do about the current situation on Earth—Terra, as humanity had come to call the planet when they started spreading out among the stars—with his sons—his birth-son Malcador, and his four adopted sons Constantine, Ra, Helios, and Mikaelor. Daenus didn’t have any idea what to do about the strange purple storms surrounding the planet—and doubted he could do anything even if he knew what they were and why they were there—but they certainly could do something about the effects they were having on the planet they surrounded.

What had been a single, democratically-elected planetary government (with only a few minor holdouts in the settled areas of the poles) had collapsed into a large handful of powerful warlords, all vying for power between themselves. It had happened many times before, Daenus commented, but the difference now was that most of the major warlords had nuclear weapons. “And none of them are particularly opposed to using them,” Malcador commented, with much agreement from his adopted sons.

“We don’t really have a choice about uniting them,” Ra noted. “If we don’t do anything, we’ll all die of radiation poisoning or worse. Problem is, it’s just us down here, and we can’t exactly go handing out leaflets.”

“Best case scenario, we’d be shot on sight,” Mikaelor agreed. “I mean…admittedly all of us would survive that, but then they’d just get a bigger gun. Point is, we need an army, and supplies for that army…at least we do if we’re going to be fixing anything.”

“We’ll have to make an army,” Daenus stated. “And since I have a problem with kidnapping that many children to do it in a more traditional way, we’ll have to get unorthodox about it.”

“You’re thinking about making golems, aren’t you?” Malcador asked, and Constantine put down his finger and closed his mouth on his own question about what Daenus had meant—though they all knew that ‘unorthodox’ was code for blood magic, and his adopted sons had long since stopped being surprised by what blood magic could actually do, only Daenus and Malcador truly knew how much they could actually do with their blood.

“Yes, I am. In the meantime, I’m thinking we should probably start tunneling some more…we’ll need expansions for a manufactory and storage facility, for example, and more farming area,” Daenus stated; Mikaelor began quietly sketching out areas where they could potentially expand in the three-dimensional map of their home.

Helios watched for a while, but then returned his attention to his father. “So what exactly goes into making a golem, other than a lot of blood?”

“A lot of time and control, mostly,” Malcador replied. “You have to understand exactly how the human body works; it’s a really delicate machine, and if you mess up something tiny even a little bit…” he shrugged. Helios was nodding, and thinking hard.

“How long does it take to make a golem?” he asked.

“If you’re good at it and know what you’re doing, it takes about three months. That’s from nothing to an adult human body,” Daenus answered. “The question is whether these golems should have a brain,” he stated, then fell back into his thoughts. Malcador groaned and flopped backwards; he apparently hadn’t considered that particular problem immediately, and now it threatened to consume him.

“Golems don’t normally come with brains?” Helios and Ra asked simultaneously, Constantine having missed the conversation, as he was helping Mikaelor design the new areas of their underground home.

“No, they don’t,” Daenus answered. “The point of a golem is to have a creature designed to do nothing but take orders and complete them to the best of their ability. It isn’t technically a person, and won’t have a soul of its own. You can make it really detailed, and you can give it really complex orders that make it simulate having a soul, but it won’t actually have one.” He sighed. “But if you give it a brain, you give it free will. You give it the ability to question its orders, to break them…and I have known some golems with brains to gain souls over time.” 

There was a pause before Malcador spoke. “Sounds to me like the commanders should have brains, but the rank and file shouldn’t, then.” 

“The commanders need to be able to solve problems,” Ra added. “There’s always something that goes wrong, or something no one accounted for in giving the original orders…”

Daenus considered, then nodded. “Let’s organize them into companies of a thousand or so; the commanders of those companies get the brains. I think it should be us immediately above them.”

“Us, then Malcador, then you,” Constantine corrected. When everyone looked at him he shrugged. “Just makes sense. You’re our dad.” Ra, Helios, and Mikaelor all looked at each other, then shrugged without argument. When Daenus looked inclined to protest, Constantine cut him off. “And besides, if you die…none of us can do what you’ve done what you have. We can’t make more of ourselves, and Malcador…” he trailed off, unwilling to potentially insult his other father.

“Is a bit handicapped in the magic area,” Malcador finished. “He’s right, though. You have to stay safer than the rest of us, since you can heal us from the edge of death, or…worst case scenario, reach past it.” At that, Daenus sighed.

“Fine, fine. I’ll stay off the front lines for the most part,” he conceded. He’d been looking forward to fighting for himself again, in part to prove that he could without losing control, and in part because he’d wanted to form a closer bond with his created soldiers. Since he couldn’t do that now, he’d have to content himself with the act of creation.

~~*~~

Daenus began his army by creating single golem commander. It took him five months to bring it to full growth, in part because he ran into trouble with the brain; Malcador, on seeing this, began work on a machine that he insisted would help in the future. Daenus focused on educating the golem personally as much as possible; with the golem built to focus on warfare, he soon had to turn its more practical education over to his adopted sons while he answered its more esoteric questions:

 _What am I fighting for? What is my symbol?_ The unification of Terra was the end goal, but a simple globe—or a resurrected symbol from the ancient past, such as that of the United Nations—would not do as far as the golem was concerned. It had seen most of the symbols Daenus had originally intended, and rejected them on the basis that they would not be taken seriously. They couldn’t unite Terra through peaceful means, as these symbols indicated; they would need a warrior’s symbol for a warrior’s path.

So Daenus turned to ancient mythology, with increasing irritation; the symbols of the gods of war were too generic, so far as both he and the golem was concerned. It liked the idea behind several others, but not the symbols themselves. When Daenus threw in the symbol of the thunderbird for consideration, however, the golem had paused and asked what sort of creature it was. Daenus had shrugged. “It only existed in myth,” he began. “But it was said to bring rains when it flew over, to cause storms at the flap of its wings, and to bring down lightning with its cry.”

Once the thunderbird had been explained, nothing else would do for the golem, and after a little more back and forth, Daenus had settled upon a proper sigil: a falcon’s head atop two crossed lightning bolts. He was much better pleased when his sons supported it whole-heartedly, to the point of tattooing it on themselves. But the golem had another problem only Daenus could solve, so he had turned a blind eye while answering it.

 _Who am I fighting for?_ Daenus had sighed at this, and didn’t even bother offering his name to the golem. That wasn’t what it wanted; Daenus would need a title, and a grand one. Grander than any title the warlords had claimed for themselves, one that might be taken as ridiculous at first, at least until Daenus’s string of victories could back it up. “You fight for the Emperor of Mankind,” he had said after a long pause. At this, a light had come into the golem’s eyes, and it had saluted immediately.

With that, Daenus had set himself to creating the golem’s army of mindless drones. It took him a week to begin all one thousand of them, and with his power split across them all, they were fully grown in seven months. By then, Daenus was exhausted from the effort, and had to allow his sons to train the first golem in commanding its one thousand golems while he rested.

While he was recovering, Malcador unveiled both his machines: one, a machine which would copy a brain—either from a harvested brain, in case he wanted to preserve someone’s consciousness in a new body, or from a brain scan—then print it (given the proper material) into the skull of a completed golem. His second machine was a sort of gestation capsule that would significantly lower the amount of strength and concentration Daenus would need to create a golem: all Daenus had to create from raw magic would be the circulatory system. Then he would need to provide enough blood to fill the chamber and ensure it had access to clay; the machine would take care of the rest of the process.

“You’re a fucking lifesaver,” Daenus told him. Malcador had grinned, told him to quit being silly, and turned his attention to creating proper armor for the golems; his adopted brothers all helped test it in turn. If the alloys Malcador created could withstand their punches, they would move on to melee weapons; if it could withstand those, they would move on to guns. After a year—and another batch of golems—Malcador had two suitable alloys.

One of them, auramite, was exceedingly difficult to make, but could stand up to nearly any punishment Daenus’s adopted sons could throw at it. The other, ceramite, wasn’t quite as durable, but much easier and faster to make. Daenus and his sons selected the auramite for themselves, while pushing the ceramite into production for the golems’ armor. Here too, they did their best to save on effort expended for the golems’ armor, while sparing little expense for their own. It only made sense, as Constantine put it.

What didn’t make sense to Constantine, however, was Daenus designing his own suit of armor personally. At least, it didn’t make sense until Daenus had completed his armor around the time he had created enough golems to fill a small army and be a significant threat to his weakest neighbor; the armor Daenus had created was heavy and nigh-impermeable to every weapon they had available for testing. It was so heavy and cumbersome, in fact, that his sons couldn’t move with any sort of speed, and declared it to be unusable.

At that, Daenus had smiled and stepped into the armor; with it on, he moved as fluidly and quickly as he did without it. “How?” Constantine asked when the demonstration was complete. In answer, Daenus had stepped out of the armor, and paused his natural healing to show his sons the answer: the armor he’d created used his own blood as hydraulic fluid, and as Daenus was a blood mage, that meant he could use the armor as an extension of his body. Since the armor was so powerful, and enhanced his abilities so well, it meant that Daenus could take up the front-line position he’d wanted and stay safe at the same time.

His sons had surrendered to his wishes, but grinned as they did so. Then they left their mountain home to begin the reunification of Terra.

~~*~~

_Even in the early stages of Daenus’s war for unification, it became clear that there were too many Thunder Warriors—as they’d dubbed themselves at their commanders’ insistence—and too few Custodians—as his adopted sons had taken to calling themselves, since their main duties in the war were ensuring the golems didn’t run amok. So Daenus had, at first unwillingly, begun demanding young children from the conquered nobility; partly to keep them in line, and partly because only children younger than four years old could safely become Custodians._

_The process of making a Custodian could not be safely sped up, and so the war had gotten bogged down several times while Daenus and Malcador worked to create new Custodians; without proper shepherding, the Thunder Warrior commanders cared little for protecting the newly conquered populace, and were more than happy to pillage and loot as they pleased in the name of their Emperor. The commanders constantly questioned why they were forbidden from this, but—in Ra’s opinion—if they were questioning, they weren’t breaking their orders. Even though no answer ever truly pleased the commanders, they did begin to sullenly obey and leave off their looting whenever they knew they were watched._

_Four Custodians became thirty. Thirty became a hundred. A hundred became a thousand. And as the golem army grew into the millions, and then into the billions, one thousand Custodians became three thousand. Yet the problem never truly faded, and Daenus and Malcador both knew the golem army was too unruly and uncontrollable to allow off Terra. The commanders were too smart to not realize what was happening if they were to be packed on a spaceship and ‘mistakenly’ set a course for the sun, and to ‘correct’ the mistake and take the course they had been assigned._

_They would have to be purged. There was no other way, though both Daenus and Malcador tried to find one throughout the entire thousand-year long war. When the results could no longer be denied, Daenus secretly ordered his Custodians to purge the Thunder Warriors once they were done with Terra. Then he created no more, and turned his full attention to their successors._

_These would be no rapidly-produced mass of golems. They would be humans—they had to be humans—who would receive implants to make them into super soldiers on par with the Thunder Warriors. Early adolescence would do for the age, and Daenus made peace with the techno-mages of Mars—even to the point of allowing them to retain their technology-based religion—so he could create each implant without potentially revealing the continued existence of Vicky. Malcador’s mocking nickname of “space marines” stuck, and everyone around Daenus was using the name within days of his uttering it._

_Yet the space marines would need commanders…and Daenus’s custodians were many things, but they had proven themselves throughout the course of the war to be far better as lone operators than as commanders of anything. Daenus could not be everywhere at once—at least, not without delving into his mother’s gifts, which he was loath to do without her nearby in case things went drastically wrong—and he only had so much attention. If he commanded alone, he just might conquer the galaxy, but his efforts would be slow; Terra alone had taken a thousand years, and the galaxy as a whole would take at least ten thousand._

_Therefore, if Daenus was going to reunite the galaxy, he needed his brothers back. So Daenus retrieved his notes on resurrection and retreated to the deepest parts of his labs, where Vicky yet lived. There, he sampled his own genetic template, and with her help, he managed to recreate all twenty-one of his brothers’ bodies. She guarded the sanctum from any intrusion while he prepared and cast his extended ritual to find and retrieve all twenty-one of his brothers’ souls. Despite the tens of thousands of years since they had all died, the souls had not been reborn into another body, and somehow remained as inviolate and pure as they had been when they had died. Daenus decided not to question his fortune, and ensouled his brothers in their new bodies—improved only so that they now had the modifications from rebirth what Daenus had worked for millennia to give himself._

_And when the end finally came, Daenus congratulated his Thunder Warriors on their victory at Mount Ararat. They were to enjoy it this night. Just this once, just until sunrise, they could do as they pleased. The commanders celebrated; they and their men immediately took advantage of their freedom to loot and pillage as they so loved. Only a very few commanders—the very first of them—were suspicious of this change of heart. Only a very few of those suspicious commanders were able to withstand the initial assault from the Custodians, who tore through the golem army as though they were tissue paper. Those who survived the initial assault either attacked the Custodians in dismaying self-defense and were cut down as mercilessly as the rest, or fled into the depths of the nearest city to disappear._

_Rather than reveal the terrifying nature of his Custodians to the normal human populace—as they were already terrified by the imperfect Thunder Warriors and the mere thought of the space marines—Daenus ordered them to allow the escapees go. They would die soon enough; he had not created them with lifespans longer than a century or two, and their physiology was different enough that the ancient life-extension therapies would not work on them. In the meantime, he decided that the Thunder Warriors’ sudden disappearance should be put down to a heroic, victorious last stand at their last battle._

_The lie was no comfort to the surviving Thunder Warriors. One by one, they left Terra for the wider galaxy. Each and every one of them hissed of a man styling himself as a golden god, and warned anyone they saw of him; he would say he meant well, and would say he wanted peace, but in reality? He only wanted eternal war. They would know; they were made in his image._


End file.
